700 Best Phil Knight Quotes: Author of Shoe Dog (2023)
1. “Any building is a temple if you make it so.”
2. “Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play,”
3. “If you want to spend time saying this is cool, you’re going to get your ass kicked.”
4. “En la mente del principiante hay muchas posibilidades; en la del experto hay pocas. SHUNRYU SUZUKI, Mente zen, mente de principiante”
5. “Each of us found pleasure, whenever possible, in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind. And.” — Phil Knight
6. “How can I leave my mark on the world, I thought, unless I get out there first and see it?” — Phil Knight
7. “I’ve been fortunate to be around good people.”
8. “We must all be professors of the jungle.”
9. “Dream audaciously. Have the courage to fail forward. Act with urgency.”
10. “I couldn’t look away. I watched and watched, asking myself, Is this what it’s all about? Really? I appreciated money as much as the next guy. But I wanted my life to be about so much more.”
11. “How can I leave my mark on the world unless I get out there first and see it? Before running a big race, you always want to walk the track.” – Phil Knight
12. “A product, I thought, speaks for itself, or it doesn’t.”
13. “Bowerman’s strategy for running the mile was simple. Set a fast pace for the first two laps, run the third as hard as you can, then triple your speed on the fourth. There was a Zen-like quality to this strategy, because it was impossible. And yet it worked.”
14. “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. Of”
15. “I think I’m not a natural-born salesman, for sure, but If I have a product I really believe in, I can overcome some of the shyness and get through the things that aren’t natural to me.” Phil Knight
16. “I wanted to leave my mark on the world.
17. “Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks—marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling—seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.”
18. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.”
19. “I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves.”
20. “You are remembered for the rules you break.”
21. “It is possible to tell a customer “no”, and have the customer thank you for doing it.” – Phil Knight
22. “We used to think that everything started in the lab. Now we realize that everything spins off the consumer.”
23. “I truly believe the American consumer doesn’t want to buy products made under abusive conditions.” – Phil Knight
24. “Patton. «No le digas a la gente cómo hacer las cosas; diles qué hacer y deja que te sorprendan con el resultado.»”
25. “Why is it always so hard to get started?”
26. “Now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.” – Phil Knight
27. “I think everyone born in Oregon is an environmentalist by birth.” Phil Knight
28. “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” – Phil Knight
29. “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones”
30. “I tell the man Blue Ribbon is sinking like the Titanic, and he responds by begging for a berth in first class.”
31. “In running, the only equipment that really matters – at least the mentality was in those days – were the pair of shoes that you wore.” Phil Knight
32. “a sensação de felicidade pode ser perigosa. Ela entorpece os sentidos.”
33. “There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up.” — Phil Knight
34. “But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.”
35. “Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart.”
36. “We wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.”
37. “Make history or be a part of it.”
38. “On paper, I thought, I’m an adult. Graduated from a good college—University of Oregon. Earned a master’s from a top business school—Stanford. Survived a yearlong hitch in the U.S. Army—Fort Lewis and Fort Eustis. My résumé said I was a learned, accomplished soldier,”
39. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.”
40. “Oneness–in some way, shape, or form–is what every person I've ever met has been seeking.”
41. “I wanted what everyone wants. To be me, full-time.”
42. “This database enabled Johnson to keep in touch with all his customers, at all times, and to keep them all feeling special. He sent them Christmas cards. He sent them birthday cards. He sent them notes of congratulation after they completed a big race or marathon.”
43. “The world was so overrun with war and pain and misery, the daily grind was so exhausting and often unjust- maybe the only answer, I thought, was to find some prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy, that seemed fun, that seemed a good fit, and chase it with an athlete's single-minded dedication and purpose. Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines, and I didn't want that. p4”
44. “Meeting sports athletes that are the best in the world is a thrill to this day.” – Phil Knight
45. “I’m Phil Knight, and I don’t believe in advertising.” – Phil Knight
46. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way—that leaves us.”
47. “The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.” Phil Knight
48. “I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun”
49. “He died holding every American distance record from 2,000 meters to 10,000 meters, from two miles to six miles. Of course, what he really held, what he’d captured and kept and now would never let go of, was our imaginations.”
50. “Each of us found pleasure, whenever possible, in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind.”
51. “There is no shoe school, so where do you recruit people for a company that develops and markets running shoes? The running track… We and the consumer were one and the same.” – Phil Knight
52. “Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company.”
53. “Because mothers are our first coaches.”
54. “There comes a time in every life when the past recedes and the future opens. It’s that moment when you turn to face the unknown. Some will turn back to what they already know. Some will walk straight ahead into uncertainty. I can’t tell you which one is right. But I can tell you which one is more fun.” – Phil Knight
55. You are remembered... for the rules you break.
56. “Grow or die, that’s what I believed, no matter the situation.”
57. “The best way to reinforce your knowledge of a subject is to share it.”
58. “not everyone in this world will like us, or accept us, that we’re often cast aside at the very moment we most need to be included.”
59. “Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets gets left on the sidelines, and I didn’t want that.” — Phil Knight
60. “basic rule of negotiation is to know what you want, what you need to walk away with in order to be whole.”
61. “It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself.”
62. Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.
63. “Each of us found pleasure, whenever possible, in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind. And”
64. “You can’t explain much in 60 seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don’t have to. It’s that simple.” — Phil Knight
65. “Dimension Six. I was partial to the latter, because I was the one who came up with it. Woodell and everyone else told me that it was god-awful. It wasn’t catchy, they said, and it didn’t mean anything.”
66. “In college I’d read the analects of Confucius—The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones—”
67. “Shoe dogs were people who devoted themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying, or designing of shoes.”
68. “It’s never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.” – Phil Knight
69. “Play by the rules, but be ferocious.”
70. “Free enterprise always irritates the kinds of trolls who live to block, to thwart, to say no, sorry, no.”
71. “I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.” — Phil Knight
72. “But taking a chance on people—he’s right. You could argue that’s what it’s all been about.”
73. “Da igual el tipo de deporte; da igual, de hecho, la actividad humana que se lleve a cabo: el esfuerzo absoluto siempre se gana el corazón de la gente.”
74. “Cuando el dinero empezó a entrar a raudales, nos afectó a todos. No mucho, y no por mucho tiempo, porque no era la motivación de ninguno de nosotros. Pero esa es la naturaleza del dinero. Lo tengas o no, lo quieras o no, te guste o no, definirá tu día a día. Nuestra labor como seres humanos es no permitir que lo haga.”
75. “Johnson had pointed out that seemingly all iconic brands—Clorox, Kleenex, Xerox—have short names. Two syllables or less.”
76. “Pre was most famous for saying, “Somebody may beat me—but they’re going to have to bleed to do it.”
77. “Play by the rules, but be ferocious.” Phil Knight, Founder of Nike
78. “As ever, the accountant in me saw the risk, the entrepreneur saw the possibility. So I split the difference and kept moving forward.”
79. “We used to think that everything started in the lab. Now we realize that everything spins off the consumer.” — Phil Knight
80. “If my life was to be all work no play, I wanted my work to be play.”
81. “Nigdy nie mów ludziom, jak coś zrobić. Powiedz im, co zrobić, a oni zaskoczą cię pomysłowością.
82. “There is a primal urge to compare everything – life, business, adventures of all sorts – to a race. But the metaphor is often inadequate. It can take you only so far.”
83. “I find students today much smarter and more competent than in my time, I also find them far more pessimistic. Occasionally they ask in dismay: where is the US going? Where is the world going? Where are the new entrepreneurs? Are we doomed as a society to a worse future for our children?
84. “But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.”
85. “De todos los grandes generales, era al que más le obsesionaba el tema del calzado: «Un soldado con zapatos es solo un soldado. Pero con botas se convierte en un guerrero».”
86. “Whenever reporters said a factory was unsatisfactory, they never said how much better it was than the day we first went in. They never said how hard we’d worked with our factory partners to upgrade conditions, to make them safer and cleaner. They never said these factories weren’t ours, that we were renters, one among many tenants. They simply searched until they found a worker with complaints about conditions, and they used that worker to vilify us, and only us, knowing our name would generate maximum publicity. Of”
87. “in the moment, but now I do. The years of stress were taking their toll. When you see only problems, you’re not seeing clearly. At just the moment I needed to be my sharpest, I was approaching burnout.”
88. “I was fascinated by all the great generals, from Alexander the Great to George Patton. I hated war, but I loved the warrior spirit.”
89. “Before I died, became too old or consumed with everyday minutiae, I wanted to visit the planet’s most beautiful and wondrous places.”
90. “People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition.”
91. “Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.”
92. “We spent a few minutes catching up. I told Bowerman about my trip around the world. Kobe, Jordan, the Temple of Nike.”
93. “I’ve always believed that businesses should be good citizens…”
94. “Whatever comes, just don’t stop. That’s.”
95. “If there’s one thing, I’ve been pretty good at evaluating people.” Phil Knight
96. “Play by the rules, but be ferocious,” advises Phil Knight, the brains behind one of today’s most popular sports brands, Nike. There’s even more to learn from Knight, too.
97. “You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break. I.” — Phil Knight
98. “The city was mired in a historic cold snap. I had it all to myself. Even the Sistine Chapel. Alone under Michelangelo’s ceiling, I was able to wallow in my disbelief. I read in my guidebook that Michelangelo was miserable while painting his masterpiece. His back and neck ached. Paint fell constantly into his hair and eyes. He couldn’t wait to be finished, he told friends. If even Michelangelo didn’t like his work, I thought, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
99. “The things I loved most—books, sports, democracy, free enterprise—started as crazy ideas.”
100. “Don’t go to sleep one night, wrote Rūmī, the thirteenth-century Persian poet. What you most want will come to you then. Warmed”
101. “You run and run, mile after mile, and you never quite know why. You tell yourself that you’re running toward some goal, chasing some rush, but really you run because the alternative, stopping, scares you to death.”
102. “When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama.”
103. “The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.” — Phil Knight
104. “We wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.” – Phil Knight
105. “Meeting sports athletes that are the best in the world is a thrill to this day.”
106. “You’ve got to worry about what’s coming up to stay ahead of the curve.”
107. “You can’t explain much in 60 seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don’t have to. It’s that simple.”
108. “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones—”
109. “War is the most extreme of conditions. But business has its warlike parallels. Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.”
110. “don’t be pushy. Don’t come on like the typical asshole American, the typical gaijin—rude, loud, aggressive, not taking no for an answer. The Japanese do not react well to the hard sell. Negotiations here tend to be soft, sinewy.”
111. “Like it or not, life is a game.” – Phil Knight
112. “To study the self is to forget the self.”
113. “Life is growth. You grow or you die.” -- Phil Knight
114. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.” — Phil Knight
115. “And we were nearly all merciless self-loathers, which kept the egos in check. There was none of that smartest-guy-in-the-room foolishness. Hayes, Strasser, Woodell, Johnson, each would have been the smartest guy in any room, but none believed it of himself, or the next guy.”
116. “It doesn’t matter how many people you offend, as long as you’re getting your message to your consumers. I say to those people who do not want to offend anybody: You are going to have a very, very difficult time having meaningful advertising.” – Phil Knight
117. “Queria experimentar o que os chineses chamam de Tao; os gregos, de Logos; os hindus, de Jnana; os budistas, de Darma. O que os cristãos chamam de Espírito.”
118. “find some prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy, that seemed fun, that seemed a good fit, and chase it with an athlete’s single-minded dedication and purpose.”
119. “I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.”
120. “Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.”
121. “No matter the sport—no matter the human endeavor, really—total effort will win people’s hearts.”
122. “It doesn’t matter how many people you offend, as long as you’re getting your message to your consumers. I say to those people who do not want to offend anybody: ‘You are going to have a very, very difficult time having meaningful advertising.'”
123. “Life is growth, You grow or you die.”
124. “I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.” – Phil Knight
125. “Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn't mean stopping. Don't ever stop.”
126. “I spent my last night thinking back over my trip, making notes in my journal. I asked myself, What was the highlight? Greece, I thought. No question. Greece.”
127. “Bowerman was forever griping that people make the mistake of thinking only elite Olympians are athletes. But everyone’s an athlete, he said. If you have a body, you’re an athlete.” — Phil Knight
128. “But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.” — Phil Knight
129. “Play by the rules, but be ferocious.” – Phil Knight
130. “Maybe the cure for any burnout, I thought, is to just work harder.”
131. “More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman.”
132. “People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.”
133. “Even the Sistine Chapel. Alone under Michelangelo’s ceiling, I was able to wallow in my disbelief. I read in my guidebook that Michelangelo was miserable while painting his masterpiece. His back and neck ached. Paint fell constantly into his hair and eyes. He couldn’t wait to be finished, he told friends. If even Michelangelo didn’t like his work, I thought, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
134. “The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.”
135. “A wise man climbs Fuji once. A fool climbs it twice.”
136. “Any entrepreneur has to prepare for a lot of dark days, and they’ve got to really like what they are doing, and they have to have a reason for it to succeed.” – Phil Knight
137. “When it came rolling in, the money affected us all. Not much, and not for long, because none of us was ever driven by money. But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.” — Phil Knight
138. “I feel in my heart this is a war we can win. And if we win it, when we win it, I see great things for us on the other side of victory. We are still alive, people. We are still. Alive.”
139. “Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company. No that any of us thought we wouldn't fail; in fact we had every expectation that we would. But when we did fail, we had faith that we'd do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it.”
140. “Somehow, in meeting after meeting, I held my tongue. Everything my banker said, I ultimately accepted. Then I’d do exactly as I pleased.”
141. “When you see only problems, you’re not seeing clearly.”
142. “There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.” Phil Knight
143. “I’m in the shoe business. Look at these things. They’re called Tigers. I faked out the company. I’m the US distributor. Come with me.”
144. “Wisdom seemed an intangible asset,”
145. “I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If”
146. “You tell yourself that you’re running toward some goal, chasing some rush, but really you run because the alternative, stopping, scares you to death. So”
147. “We took advantage of the running boom, which became the jogging boom, which became the fitness boom, and we’ve benefited from all of that.” Phil Knight
148. “You can’t explain much in 60 seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don’t have to. It’s that simple.” – Phil Knight
149. “if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons.”
150. “Instead of cherishing how far we'd come, I saw only how far we had to go”
151. “He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to—equally important qualities in a friend. Essential in a travel companion. But”
152. “So much to do. So much to learn. So much I don’t know about my own life.”
153. “It was my first real awareness that not everyone in this world will like us, or accept us, that we’re often cast aside at the very moment we most need to be included.”
154. “I didn’t say I’m walking away. I said I was stepping down as chairman. I won’t walk away. I’ll be carried away.”
155. “Queria o que todo mundo quer: ser eu mesmo, em tempo integral.”
156. “Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.”
157. “I refused to even consider ordering less inventory. Grow or die, that’s what I believed, no matter the situation.” – Phil Knight
158. “Just keep going. Don’t stop.”
159. “Luck plays a big role. Yes, I’d like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination”
160. “I know when the Berlin wall went down and I walked into what was East Berlin and saw two big Nike banners – that gave me a chill.” Phil Knight
161. “And yet the first-century rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah said our work is the holiest part of us. All are proud of their craft. God speaks of his work; how much more should man.”
162. “he was all the colors of an Easter egg.”
163. “Meeting sports athletes that are the best in the world is a thrill to this day.” Phil Knight
164. “I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling.”
165. “Above all, that war, more than other wars, seemed to be run along the same principles as my bank. Fight not to win, but to avoid losing. A surefire losing strategy.”
166. “I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.”
167. “Life is growth. You grow or you die.”
168. “There is no shoe school, so where do you recruit people for a company that develops and markets running shoes? The running track… We and the consumer were one and the same.”
169. “When you hired an accountant, you knew he or she could count. When you hired a lawyer, you knew he or she could talk. When you hired a marketing expert, or product developer, what did you know? Nothing. You”
170. “Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.” – Phil Knight
171. “Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop.” -- Phil Knight
172. “At first, we couldn’t be establishment, because we didn’t have any money. We were guerrilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit. But, as we became No. 1 in our industry, we’ve had to modify our culture and become a bit more planned.” Phil Knight
173. “You only have to succeed the last time.”
174. “Our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all… different. I wanted to leave a mark on the world.”
175. “Oneness—in some way, shape, or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking.”
176. “There comes a time in every life when the past recedes and the future opens. It’s that moment when you turn to face the unknown. Some will turn back to what they already know. Some will walk straight ahead into uncertainty. I can’t tell you which one is right. But I can tell you which one is more fun.”
177. “Grow or die, that’s what I believed, no matter the situation”
178. “Don’t go to sleep one night, wrote Rūmī, the thirteenth-century Persian poet. What you most want will come to you then.”
179. “When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman.”
180. “There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up.”
181. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. —Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”
182. “if one manager at a company can think tactically and strategically, that company has a good future.”
183. “I still get real nervous when I go in front of more than two people.” — Phil Knight
184. “If you're following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you've ever felt.”
185. “The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye. FOR”
186. “We were trying to create a brand, but also a culture. We were fighting against conformity, against boringness, against drudgery. More than a product, we were trying to sell an idea – a spirit.”
187. “When you really understand who you are, it enables you to fight and believe.” – Phil Knight
188. “We wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.” — Phil Knight
189. “This is what sports are, what they can do. Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.”
190. “Why you do such a thing?” Ito demanded. “Because I think Blue Ribbon could be great success,” Sumeragi said, “maybe $20 million account. I shake hands many times with Mr. Steve Prefontaine. I shake hands with Mr. Bill Bowerman. I go many times to Trail Blazer game with Mr. Phil Knight. I even pack orders at warehouse. Nike is my business child. Always it is nice to see one’s business child grow.” “So then,” Ito said, “you hide invoices because . . . you . . . like these men?” Deeply ashamed, Sumeragi bowed his head. “Hai,” he said. “Hai.”
191. “Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets gets left on the sidelines, and I didn’t want that.”
192. “Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment”
193. “Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.” – Phil Knight
194. “To study the self is to forget the self. Mi casa, su casa. Oneness – in some way, shape, or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking.”
195. “The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.”
196. “Perception can be changed.” — Phil Knight
197. “Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks—marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling—seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.” – Phil Knight
198. “My job is to listen to ideas, maybe cook up a few of my own, and make decisions based on what’s good for the shareholders and for the company.”
199. “You are remembered for the rules you break.” -- Phil Knight
200. “Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets gets left on the sidelines, and I didn't want that.”
201. “To study the self is to forget the self. Mi casa, su casa.”
202. “I still get real nervous when I go in front of more than two people.” – Phil Knight
203. “We understand the most important thing we do is market the product…” – Phil Knight
204. “Life is growth. Business is growth. You grow or you die.”
205. “As ever, the accountant in me saw the risk, the entrepreneur saw the possibility.”
206. “Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.” -- Phil Knight
207. “the concept of kensho, or satori—enlightenment that comes in a flash, a blinding pop. Sort of like the bulb on my Minolta. I liked that. I wanted that. But”
208. “While technology is still important, the consumer has to lead innovation.” – Phil Knight
209. “We wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.”
210. “The pain of his impatience, his hostility to my Crazy Idea—it had faded. It was long gone. But not the memory. Fathers”
211. “Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.” – Phil Knight
212. “Sports is like rock ‘n’ roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions.” – Phil Knight
213. “Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.”
214. “The harder you work, the better your Tao.”
215. “This, I decided, this is what sports are, what they can do. Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about. Walking”
216. “Leaning back in my recliner each night, staring at the ceiling, I tried to settle myself. I told myself: Life is growth. You grow or you die. WE”
217. “Apenas continue. Não pare. Nem pense em parar enquanto não chegar lá e não pense muito sobre onde fica esse “lá”. O que quer que aconteça, não pare.”
218. “No one heard. No one cared. They cared only about the bottom line. Not even the bottom line, but their bottom line. I”
219. “man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones—and”
220. “If you want to spend time saying this is cool, you’re going to get your ass kicked.” – Phil Knight
221. “The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. Too”
222. “Running is a basic ingredient for your health, just as much as eating and sleeping, but going out for a run by yourself and taking a moment to think also creates a certain peace.” Phil Knight
223. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass”
224. “How can I leave my mark on the world, I thought, unless I get out there first and see it?”
225. “The purpose of life is to find your passion and pursue it. – Unknown
226. “People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.”
227. “Poorer, but properly outfitted at last, I set off.”
228. “‘The cowards never started,’ he’d tell me, ‘and the weak died along the way - that leaves us.’”
229. “There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought. Signs.” — Phil Knight
230. “Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart. In.”
231. “When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about. Walking”
232. “To entrepreneurs: I'd tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time and with whom they want to spend it for the next 40 years”
233. “Access to play should be a kid’s inalienable right.” – Phil Knight
234. “When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will.”
235. “The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.” – Phil Knight
236. “The world is made up of crazy ideas - I told myself. Let everybody else call your idea crazy... just keep going DON'T STOP. Don't even think about stopping until you get there, and don't give much thought to where "there" is. Whatever comes, just don't stop.”
237. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”
238. “where no idea was too sacred to be mocked, and no person was too important to be ridiculed, it also summed up the company spirit, mission and ethos.”
239. “I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: ‘I made that.’ It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.”
240. “And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop. Luck”
241. “We were sad to leave the old house, of course. Both boys had taken their first steps there, and Matthew had lived for that swimming pool. He was never so at peace as when frolicking in the water. I recall Penny shaking her head and saying, “One thing’s for certain. That boy will never drown.”
242. “My job is to listen to ideas, maybe cook up a few of my own, and make decisions based on what’s good for the shareholders and for the company.” – Phil Knight
243. “wasn’t built for heavy doses of rejection. I’d known this about myself since high school, freshman year, when I got cut from the baseball team. A small setback, in the grand scheme, but it knocked me sideways. It was my first real awareness that not everyone in this world will like us, or accept us, that we’re often cast aside at the very moment we most need to be included. I”
244. “I looked at my mother. As usual, she said nothing. She simply smiled, vaguely, prettily. I got my shyness from her, that was plain. I often wished I’d also gotten her looks.”
245. “No matter the sport-no matter the human endeavor, really-total effort will win people’s hearts.”
246. “When you really understand who you are, it enables you to fight and believe.”
247. “I wanted what everyone wants. To be me, full-time.” – Phil Knight
248. “We were trying to create a brand, I said, but also a culture!.”
249. “Então, muitas vezes, ela amarrava uma corda na minha cama e me fazia usá-la para descer de rapel da janela do segundo andar. E cronometrava o tempo. O que os vizinhos deviam pensar? O que eu devia pensar? Provavelmente isto: a vida é perigosa. E isto: precisamos estar sempre preparados.”
250. “No matter the sport-no matter the human endeavor, really-total effort will win people’s hearts”
251. “But it was always uplifting for the crowd. No matter the sport—no matter the human endeavor, really—total effort will win people’s hearts.”
252. “History is one long processional of crazy ideas. The things I loved most—books, sports, democracy, free enterprise—started as crazy ideas.”
253. “I’ve been fortunate to be around good people.” Phil Knight
254. “But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I'd fail quickly, so I'd have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn't much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.”
255. “We laughed, cheered, clinked glasses, and something passed between us, the same thing that passes between me and most of the athletes I work with. A transference, a camaraderie, a sort of connection. It's brief, but it nearly always happens, and I know it's part of what I was searching for when I went around the world in 1962. To study the self is to forget the self... Oneness -- in some way, shape or form, it's what every person I've ever met has been seeking.”
256. “The trees always seemed to know. The trees always had your back.”
257. “When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.”
258. “A shoe dog is somebody that really loves shoes, and that was me. I was a runner – that became important to me, and it’s been with me ever since.” Phil Knight
259. “Nothing gave him more pleasure than laying waste to a hoagie and a bottle of vodka, unless it was doing both while studying a spreadsheet.”
260. “Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart.”
261. “Sports is like rock ‘n’ roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions.” — Phil Knight
262. “The world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long processional of crazy ideas. The things I loved most – books, sports, democracy, free enterprise – started as crazy ideas.”
263. “I’m Phil Knight, and I don’t believe in advertising.” Phil Knight
264. “I think a businessman can be an artist just as much as a writer or a sculptor, so I’m real proud of what the company has become.” – Phil Knight
265. “When you see only problems, you’re not seeing clearly.” — Phil Knight
266. “When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier or healthier or safer or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is — you’re participating more full in the whole grand human drama.”
267. “Now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.”
268. “Let everyone else call your idea crazy... Just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where ‘there’ is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.” -- Phil Knight
269. “Sports is like rock ‘n’ roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions.” Phil Knight
270. “Every businessman, or every person who has a passion for his work, is torn for the time spent at work and the time spent with your family.” Phil Knight
271. “What if there were a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing.”
272. “I am a man who has always needed heroes.” – Phil Knight
273. “If you want to spend time saying, ‘This is cool,’ you’re going to get your ass kicked.”
274. “Make history or be a part of it.” – Phil Knight
275. “Fight not to win, but to avoid losing. A surefire losing strategy.” – Phil Knight
276. “Não se pode trilhar o caminho antes de se tornar o próprio caminho, disse Buda,”
277. “We have to innovate for a specific reason, and that reason comes from the market. Otherwise, we’ll end up making museum pieces.” – Phil Knight
278. “Of course it’s possible that they weren’t arrogant at all, that to motivate myself I needed to see them as a monster.”
279. “I truly believe the American consumer doesn’t want to buy products made under abusive conditions.” — Phil Knight
280. “gazing around. Calm, green, tranquil—I was proud to call Oregon my home, proud to call little Portland my place of birth. But I felt a stab of regret, too. Though beautiful, Oregon struck some people as the kind of place where”
281. “It doesn’t matter how many people you offend, as long as you’re getting your message to your consumers. I say to those people who do not want to offend anybody: You are going to have a very, very difficult time having meaningful advertising.”
282. ... I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long processional of crazy ideas. The things I loved most - books, sports, democracy, free enterprise - started as crazy ideas... Let everyone else call your idea crazy . . . Just keep going. Don't stop. Don't even think about stopping until you get there, and don't give much thought to where there" is. Whatever comes, just don't stop."
283. “The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.”
284. The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.
285. “Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.” -- Phil Knight
286. “Bowerman was forever griping that people make the mistake of thinking only elite Olympians are athletes. But everyone’s an athlete, he said. If you have a body, you’re an athlete.”
287. “A vida é crescimento. Ou você cresce, ou morre.”
288. “My job is to listen to ideas, maybe cook up a few of my own, and make decisions based on what’s good for the shareholders and for the company.” — Phil Knight
289. “Access to play should be a kid’s inalienable right.”
290. “This, I decided, this is what sports are, what they can do. Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people's victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.”
291. “He straightened his tie. "Such stupidity", he said.
292. “It’s hard enough to invent and manufacture and market a product, but then the logistics, the mechanics, the hydraulics of getting it to the people who want it, when they want it—this is how companies die, how ulcers are born.”
293. “You cannot travel the path until you have become the path yourself,”
294. “O mundo estava inundado de guerra, dor e amargura, a luta diária era exaustiva e, com frequência, injusta.”
295. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. – Shunryu.”
296. “Não diga às pessoas como fazer as coisas, diga a elas o que fazer e permita que elas o surpreendam com seus resultados.”
297. “He was waiting for me to bend, to up my offer, but for once in my life I had leverage, because I had nothing left to give. "Take it or leave it" is like four of a kind. Hard to beat.”
298. “Play by the rules, but be ferocious.” -- Phil Knight
299. “Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart.” -- Phil Knight
300. “Free enterprise always irritates the kinds of trolls who live to block, to thwart, to say no, sorry, no. And it’s always been this way. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They’ve always fought uphill, and the hill has never been steeper.”
301. “confidence was cash. You had to have some to get some. And people were loath to give it to you.”
302. “Self is a mirage, a fever dream, and our stubborn belief in its reality not only wastes life, but shortens it. Self is the bald-faced lie we tell ourselves daily, and happiness requires seeing through the lie, debunking it.”
303. “I’m Phil Knight, and I don’t believe in advertising.” — Phil Knight
304. “You had to have some to get some. And people were loath to give it to you.”
305. “Onde quer que você passe do profano ao sagrado – expliquei –, encontrará um portão torii.”
306. “I tell them about the untapped resources, natural and human, that the world has at its disposal, the abundant ways and means to solve its many crises. All we have to do, I tell the students, is work and study, study and work, hard as we can. Put another way: We must all be professors of the jungle.”
307. “I read in my guidebook that Michelangelo was miserable while painting his masterpiece. His back and neck ached. Paint fell constantly into his hair and eyes. He couldn’t wait to be finished, he told friends. If even Michelangelo didn’t like his work, I thought, what hope is there for the rest of us? I”
308. “You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break. I”
309. “I still get real nervous when I go in front of more than two people.” Phil Knight
310. “So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy. . . just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where “there” is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.” – Phil Knight
311. “If my life was to be all work no play, I wanted my work to be play.” — Phil Knight
312. “I’d spent weeks and weeks on that paper. I’d moved into the library, devoured everything I could find about importing and exporting, about starting a company. Finally, as required, I’d given a formal presentation of the paper to my classmates, who reacted with formal boredom. Not one asked a single question. They greeted my passion and intensity with labored sighs and vacant stares. The”
313. “It’s not enough to do good things. You have to let people know what you’re doing.”
314. “It’s not enough to do good things. You have to let people know what you’re doing.”
315. “A inspiração, ele aprendeu, pode chegar a partir de coisas cotidianas. Coisas que você pode comer. Ou encontrar pelos cantos da casa.”
316. “I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my shorts and sweatshirt, and laced up my green running shoes. Then slipped quietly out the back door. I stretched my legs, my hamstrings, my lower back, and groaned as I took the”
317. “When you hired an accountant, you knew he or she could count. When you hired a lawyer, you knew he or she could talk. When you hired a marketing expert, or product developer, what did you know? Nothing. You couldn’t predict what he or she could do, or if he or she could do anything.”
318. “Hard, brown, ancient, he possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness, a blend of grit and integrity and calcified stubbornness that was rare in Lyndon Johnson’s America. Today it’s all but extinct.”
319. “Woodell. But Kitami was soon back.”
320. “I’d tell men and women in their mid twenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.”
321. “Dream audaciously. Have the courage to fail forward. Act with urgency.” — Phil Knight
322. “There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life.” – Phil Knight
323. “The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.” – Phil Knight
324. “If there was no Bill Bowerman, there would have been no me. He had about as much of an impact on my life as any one person could have. He taught me about competition and ingrained it in me. He taught me not to praise ordinary performances.” Phil Knight
325. “you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me.”
326. “At twenty-four I did have a Crazy Idea, and somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst, and fears about the future, and doubts about myself, as all young men and women in their midtwenties are, I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long processional of crazy ideas. The things I loved most—books, sports, democracy, free enterprise—started as crazy ideas.”
327. “We needed to transfer our sales-distribution center, from Holliston, Massachusetts, to a new forty-thousand-square-foot space in Greenland, New Hampshire,”
328. “When I first left Oregon I was most excited about two things on my itinerary. I wanted to pitch the Japanese my Crazy Idea. And I wanted to stand before the Acropolis.”
329. “When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me. THERE”
330. “No matter the sport-no matter the human endeavor, really-total effort will win people's hearts”
331. “There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought. Signs”
332. “Hard, brown, ancient, he possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness, a blend of grit and integrity and calcified stubbornness that was rare in Lyndon Johnson’s America.”
333. “Dream audaciously. Have the courage to fail forward. Act with urgency.” – Phil Knight
334. “Aquí, como ves, has de correr tanto como puedas para permanecer en el mismo sitio. Si quieres llegar a alguna otra parte tienes que correr por lo menos el doble de rápido. LEWIS CARROLL, A través del espejo”
335. “Every runner understands this. Front runners always work the hardest, and risk the most. Long.” — Phil Knight
336. “It’s alright to be Goliath but always act like David.”
337. “Play by the rules, but be ferocious.” — Phil Knight, businessman and co-founder of Nike
338. “I don’t consider myself enigmatic, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my public persona.” – Phil Knight
339. “I savored that first physical awakening, that brilliant moment before the mind is fully clear, when the limbs and joints first begin to loosen and the material body starts to melt away. Solid to liquid.”
340. “Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?”
341. “Ať se vám to líbí nebo ne, život je jako sport, život je jako hra. Kdokoli se od takové pravdy odvrací, kdokoli prostě odmítne hrát, zůstane stát za postranní čarou, a to jsem nechtěl. Víc než cokoli jeného jsem přesně tohle nechtěl.”
342. “after that day I discovered the Aristophanes play, set in the Temple of Nike, in which the warrior gives the king a gift—a pair of new shoes.”
343. “Antes de correr uma grande prova, é sempre bom caminhar pela pista.”
344. “Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome.”
345. “You cannot travel the path until you have become the path yourself, said the Buddha,”
346. “I don’t consider myself enigmatic, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my public persona.” — Phil Knight
347. “I wanted to win. No, that’s not right. I simply didn’t want to lose. And”
348. “I was a linear thinker and according to Zen, linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keeps us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.”
349. “The way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We happened to be great at it.” – Phil Knight
350. “If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.”
351. “People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting,”
352. “I went to Cairo, to the Giza plateau, and stood beside desert nomads and their silk-draped camels at the foot of the Great Sphinx, all of us squinting up into its eternally open eyes. The sun hammered down on my head, the same sun that hammered down on the thousands of men who built these pyramids, and the millions of visitors who came after. Not one of them was remembered, I thought. All is vanity, says the Bible. All is now, says Zen. All is dust, says the desert.”
353. “A maior parte da minha renda pessoal excedente ia para os bares na orla. Os turistas iam beber nos resorts de luxo, aqueles cujos nomes pareciam palavras mágicas – o Moana, o Halekulani –, mas Carter e eu preferíamos os de pior reputação. Gostávamos de nos sentar com os nossos amigos da praia e os surfistas, os aventureiros e os vagabundos, e nos sentíamos orgulhosos da única coisa que tínhamos a nosso favor: a geografia.”
354. “I trusted them, wholly, and didn’t look over their shoulders, and that bred a powerful two-way loyalty. My management style wouldn’t have worked for people who wanted to be guided, every step, but this group found it liberating, empowering. I let them be, let them do, let them make their own mistakes, because that’s how I’d always liked people to treat me.”
355. “You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break.”
356. “I refused to even consider ordering less inventory. Grow or die, that’s what I believed, no matter the situation.”
357. “The art of competing, I'd learned from track, was the art of forgetting. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.”
358. “No matter the sport-no matter the human endeavor, really-total effort will win people’s hearts.” – Phil Knight
359. “I wanted to win. No, that’s not right. I simply didn’t want to lose.”
360. “Every runner understands this. Front runners always work the hardest, and risk the most. Long.”
361. “There were no cars, no people, no signs of life. I was all alone, the world to myself—though the trees seemed oddly aware of me.”
362. “Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.”
363. You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you. (line from the movie "The Bucket List", quoted by Phil Knight)
364. “A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing.”
365. “We understand the most important thing we do is market the product.”
366. “If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt. I’d”
367. “You could issue two classes of stock—class A and class B. The public would get class Bs, which would carry one vote per share. The founders and inner circle, and your convertible debenture holders, would get class As, which would entitle them to name three-quarters of the board of directors. In other words, you raise enormous sums of money, turbocharge your growth, but ensure that you keep control.”
368. “There is no drama like the drama on the athletic field.” Phil Knight
369. “Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are really part of a very big advertising program, and the fact that they make so much money is because the markets have dictated that they get that money, and the fact that they endorse our products allows us to sell more products and create more jobs.” — Phil Knight
370. “While technology is still important, the consumer has to lead innovation.”
371. “Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines, and I didn’t want that. More than anything, that was what I did not want. Which led me, as always, to my crazy idea. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I need to take one more look at my crazy idea. Maybe my crazy idea just might… work?”
372. “like it or not, life is a game. whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines.”
373. “I still get real nervous when I go in front of more than two people.”
374. “Somebody may beat me—but they’re going to have to bleed to do it.”
375. “More than once, over my first cup of coffee in the morning, or while trying to fall asleep at night, I’d tell myself: Maybe I’m a fool? Maybe this whole damn shoe thing is a fool’s errand? Maybe, I thought. Maybe.”
376. “In many ways my father was a conventional Episcopalian, a believer in Jesus Christ. But he also worshipped another secret deity—respectability. Colonial house, beautiful wife, obedient kids, my father enjoyed having these things, but what he really cherished was his friends and neighbors knowing he had them. He liked being admired. He liked doing a vigorous backstroke each day in the mainstream.”
377. “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. Of.”
378. “If you’re trying to get into the sports business, you really have to find a niche.” Phil Knight
379. “Supply and demand is always the root problem in business. It’s been true since Phoenician traders raced to bring Rome the coveted purple dye that colored the clothing of royals and rich people; there was never enough purple to go around. It’s hard enough to invent and manufacture and market a product, but then the logistics, the mechanics, the hydraulics of getting it to the people who want it, when they want it – this is how companies die, how ulcers are born.”
380. “Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop.”
381. “Life is growth. You grow or you die.”
382. “I got into the habit every night of phoning my father from my recliner. He’d always be in his recliner, too, and together, recliner to recliner, we’d hash out the latest threat confronting Blue Ribbon.”
383. “People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible. Sometimes”
384. “It doesn’t matter how many people you offend, as long as you’re getting your message to your consumers. I say to those people who do not want to offend anybody: You are going to have a very, very difficult time having meaningful advertising.” — Phil Knight
385. “luchar no para ganar, sino para no perder. Una infalible estrategia perdedora.”
386. When you see only problems, you're not seeing clearly.
387. “No parent should have their child die before he or she does.” Phil Knight
388. “Like it or not, life is a game.”
389. “It’s alright to be Goliath but always act like David.” – Phil Knight
390. “When it came rolling in, the money affected us all. Not much, and not for long, because none of us was ever driven by money. But that's the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.”
391. “We understand the most important thing we do is market the product…”
392. “You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.” – Phil Knight
393. “There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought. Signs.”
394. “So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves.”
395. “Our stock was worth twenty-two dollars a share. That was the number. We’d earned that number. We deserved to be on the high end of the price range. A company called Apple was also going public that same week, and selling for twenty-two dollars a share, and we were worth as much as them,”
396. “Though I’ve been known to call business war without bullets, it’s actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity.”
397. "Sometimes, you have to give up. Sometimes, knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop."— Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike
398. “Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.” — Phil Knight
399. “In one country, which shall be nameless, when we tried to raise wages, we found ourselves called on the carpet, summoned to the office of a top government official and ordered to stop. We were disrupting the nation’s entire economic system, he said. It’s simply not right, he insisted, or feasible, that a shoe worker makes more than a medical doctor.
400. “That’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.”
401. “This I decided is what sports are, what they can do. Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people's victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.”
402. “The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting... You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice, screaming, begging, ‘Not one more step!’” -- Phil Knight
403. “I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.”
404. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all . . . different. I wanted to leave a mark on the world. I wanted to win. No, that's not right. I simply didn't want to lose... Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines, and I didn't want that. More than anything, that was the thing I didn't want.
405. “Tinha uma sensação dolorosa de que o nosso tempo é breve, muito mais efêmero do que jamais saberemos, tão breve quanto uma corrida pela manhã, e queria que o meu tempo significasse alguma coisa. E que tivesse um propósito. E que fosse criativo. E importante. E, acima de tudo... diferente.”
406. “I’d hired Strasser for his legal mind, but by 1977 I’d discovered his true talent. Negotiating. The first few times I asked him to work out a contract with sports agents, the toughest negotiators in the world, he more than held his own. I was amazed. So were the agents. Every time, Strasser walked away with more than we’d ever hoped. No one scared him, no one matched him in a clash of wills. By 1977 I was sending him into every negotiation with total confidence, as if I were sending n the Eighty-Second Airborne.
407. “It’s possible that we were never closer, maybe because our relationship had been reduced to its primal essence. He was my dad, I was his son, and I was in the fight of my life.”
408. “Dream audaciously. Have the courage to fail forward. Act with urgency.”
409. “I didn’t consider myself an optimist by nature. Not that I was a pessimist. I generally tried to hover between the two, committing to neither.”
410. “The only time you must not fail is the last time you try.” – Phil Knight
411. “one line in The Bucket List. “You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.”
412. “And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop.”
413. “There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.” – Phil Knight
414. “Quem nega essa verdade, quem se recusa a entrar no jogo, fica esperando nas linhas laterais”
415. “Quería experimentar lo que los chinos llaman tao, los griegos logos, los hindúes jñāna, los budistas dharma. Lo que los cristianos llaman espíritu. «Antes”
416. “the best way to reinforce your knowledge of a subject is to share it, so”
417. “We could see that he was a charismatic guy who jumps over the moon and is very competitive, but nobody could have predicted what he would become to our culture.” Phil Knight
418. “happiness is a how, not a what.”
419. “But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days.”
420. “Gostando ou não, a vida é um jogo. Quem nega essa verdade, quem se recusa a entrar no jogo, fica esperando nas linhas laterais”
421. “In Europe, I’m told, there are T-shirts that read, Where is Jeff Johnson? Like the famous opening line from Ayn Rand, Who is John Galt? The answer is, Right where he should be.”
422. “My fatherhood style, my management style. I was forever questioning, Is it good—or merely good enough?”
423. “I’d tell men and women in their mid-20s not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.”
424. “He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to—equally important qualities in a friend.”
425. “I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointment will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.”
426. “To study the self is to forget the self. Mi casa, su casa.” — Phil Knight
427. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. – Shunryu.” — Phil Knight
428. “Make history or be a part of it.” — Phil Knight
429. “When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some service or product to the lives of strangers and make them happier or healthier or safer or better and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly - the way everything should be done but seldom is, you are participating more fully in the whole vast human drama. More than simply alive, you are helping others to live more fully and if that’s business then alright - call me a businessman.”
430. “How can I leave my mark on the world unless I get out there first and see it? Before running a big race, you always want to walk the track.” -- Phil Knight
431. “Dare to take chances, lest you leave your talent buried in the ground.” — Phil Knight
432. “I was happy, maybe as happy as I’d ever been, and happiness can be dangerous. It dulls the senses.”
433. “Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.”
434. “Os japoneses acreditam que escalar o monte Fuji é uma experiência mística, um ato ritual de celebração,”
435. “We wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.” Phil Knight
436. “Life is growth. You grow or you die.” – Phil Knight
437. “I flat-out didn’t want to work for someone else. I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.”
438. “I identified with the born loser in each Buttface, and vice versa, and I knew that together we could become winners. I still didn’t know exactly what winning meant, other than not losing, but we seemed to be getting closer to a defining moment when that question would be settled, or at least more sharply defined. Maybe going public would be that moment.”
439. “Não espere nada, não procure nada, não se apegue a nada”
440. “Fight not to win, but to avoid losing. A surefire losing strategy.” — Phil Knight
441. “Every runner knows this. You run and run, mile after mile, and you never quite know why. You tell yourself that you’re running toward some goal, chasing some rush, but really you run because the alternative, stopping, scares you to death.”
442. Confidence. More than equity, more than liquidity, that's what a man needs.
443. “Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.” — Phil Knight
444. “The basic rule of negotiation is to know what you want, what you need to walk away with in order to be whole.”
445. “Carter never did mess around. See an open shot, take it—that was Carter. I told myself there was much I could learn from a guy like that as we circled the earth.”
446. “My hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.”
447. “Sería una guerra a lo Lewis Carroll, un tipo de guerra en la que un oficial estadounidense declararía cosas como: «Tuvimos que destruir la aldea para salvarla». Llegué”
448. “Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines, and I didn’t want that.”
449. “A soldier in shoes is only a soldier. But in boots he becomes a warrior. I”
450. “Fortune favors the brave,”
451. “America is becoming less entrepreneurial, not more. A Harvard Business School study recently ranked all the countries of the world in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit. America ranked behind Peru. And”
452. “Perhaps nothing ever revealed my mother’s true nature like the frequent drills she put me through. As a young girl she’d witnessed a house in her neighborhood burn to the ground; one of the people inside had been killed. So she often tied a rope to the post of my bed and made me use it to rappel out of my second-floor window. While she timed me. What must the neighbors have thought? What must I have thought? Probably this: Life is dangerous. And this: We must always be prepared. And this: My mother loves me.”
453. “There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life. At”
454. “I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt. I’d”
455. “Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.” Phil Knight
456. “The problems were never going to stop, I realized, but for the moment we had more momentum than problems.”
457. “In one sense our campus is a topographical map of Nike's history and growth; in another it's a diorama of my life. In yet another sense it's a living, breathing expression of that vital human emotion, maybe the most vital of all, after love. Gratitude.”
458. “It’s alright to be Goliath but always act like David.” — Phil Knight
459. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”
460. “Perception can be changed.” – Phil Knight
461. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. —Shunryu”
462. “Don’t go to sleep one night, wrote Rūmī, the thirteenth-century Persian poet. What you most want will come to you then. Warmed by a sun inside you’ll see wonders.”
463. “Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree. I”
464. “Any entrepreneur has to prepare for a lot of dark days, and they’ve got to really like what they are doing, and they have to have a reason for it to succeed.”
465. “In periods of stress and grief, not only does your mind do funny things, you say things that surprise you.” – Phil Knight
466. “I don’t know how long after that day I discovered the Aristophanes play, set in the Temple of Nike, in which the warrior gives the king a gift—a pair of new shoes. I don’t know when I figured out that the play was called Knights.”
467. “Luck plays a big role. Yes, I’d like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome. Some people might not call it luck. They might call it Tao, or Logos, or Jñāna, or Dharma. Or Spirit. Or God.”
468. “It’s not enough to do good things. You have to let people know what you’re doing.” – Phil Knight
469. “Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else is genius. Giving up doesn't mean stopping. DON'T EVER STOP!”
470. “Belief is irresistible.”
471. “Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are really part of a very big advertising program, and the fact that they make so much money is because the markets have dictated that they get that money, and the fact that they endorse our products allows us to sell more products and create more jobs.” – Phil Knight
472. Sometimes, you have to give up. Sometimes, knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop. — Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike
473. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. —Lewis”
474. “To study the self is to forget the self. Mi casa, su casa. Oneness—in some way, shape, or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking.”
475. “The secret of happiness, I’d always suspected, the essence of beauty or truth, or all we ever need to know of either, lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life.”
476. “If there was no Bill Bowerman, there would have been no me. He had about as much of an impact on my life as any one person could have. He taught me about competition and ingrained it in me. He taught me not to praise ordinary performances.”
477. “By God, I will make it work. No maybes about it”
478. “The easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.”
479. “Why is it so hard to get started?”
480. “I’ve said many times that I might as well have webs between my toes.” Phil Knight
481. “Marketing knits the whole organization together.”
482. “When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me.”
483. “Ultimately, we wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.”
484. “Also, Burmese pythons, Nigerian goats, African crocodiles, they would give me ample opportunities to impress her with tales of my travels.”
485. “He was my dad, I was his son, and I was in the fight of my life.”
486. “Every runner understands this. Front runners always work the hardest, and risk the most.” – Phil Knight
487. “Everybody was writing about computers and electronics, but all I really knew about was running. It’s what I’ve chosen to do with my life.”
488. “I wonder if he could conceive in that moment all that he’d done. All that would follow. I know I couldn’t”
489. “You haven’t lived until you’ve competed against the fastest runners in the world wearing shoes made of cod.”
490. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way.”
491. “Se você tem um corpo, você é um atleta.”
492. “monotonía. Más que un producto, tratábamos de vender un concepto, un espíritu.”
493. “Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines, and I didn’t want that. More than anything, that was the thing I did not want.”
494. “Você me pergunta: qual é o seu objetivo? Posso responder em uma única palavra. É vitória, vitória a todo custo, vitória, apesar de todo o terror, vitória... Sem vitória não há sobrevivência.”
495. “I don’t consider myself enigmatic, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my public persona.”
496. “I didn’t say I’m walking away. I said I was stepping down as chairman. I won’t walk away. I’ll be carried away.” Phil Knight
497. “Campbell . . . down at Bank of California.”
498. “The basic rule of negotiation is to know what you want”
499. “I do not follow conventional wisdom.” – Phil Knight
500. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way”
501. “Business is no more about making money than the human body is about making blood. Yes you need to make the stuff, but only to serve your higher aims.”
502. “There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought.”
503. “I’ve always believed that businesses should be good citizens…” – Phil Knight
504. “When it came rolling in, the money affected us all. Not much, and not for long, because none of us was ever driven by money. But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.”
505. “There comes a time in every life when the past recedes and the future opens. It’s that moment when you turn to face the unknown. Some will turn back to what they already know. Some will walk straight ahead into uncertainty. I can’t tell you which one is right. But I can tell you which one is more fun.”
506. “Running is a basic ingredient for your health, just as much as eating and sleeping, but going out for a run by yourself and taking a moment to think also creates a certain peace.”
507. “I’m Phil Knight, and I don’t believe in advertising.”
508. “Yes, I thought. Confidence. More than equity, more than liquidity, that’s what a man needs. I”
509. “I truly believe the American consumer doesn’t want to buy products made under abusive conditions.”
510. “If even Michelangelo didn’t like his work, I thought, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
511. “If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt. I’d.” — Phil Knight
512. “Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete.”
513. “There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life.”
514. “There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.”
515. “But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.” – Phil Knight
516. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way – that leaves us.” — Phil Knight
517. “It is possible to tell a customer “no”, and have the customer thank you for doing it.” — Phil Knight
518. “There was one old fan in the corner of our train car, the blades barely moving the hot dust around. To get cool, Chinese passengers thought nothing of stripping down to their underwear, and Hayes and Strasser thought this gave them license to do the same. If I live to be two hundred years old, I won’t forget the sight of those leviathans walking up and down the train car in their T-shirts and BVDs. Nor will any Chinese man or woman who was on the train that day. Before leaving China we had a final”
519. “You only have to succeed the last time.” – Phil Knight
520. “Sometimes, after a really cathartic guffaw, I’d look around the table and feel overcome by emotion. Camaraderie, loyalty, gratitude. Even love. Surely love. But I also remember feeling shocked that these were the men I’d assembled. These were the founding fathers of a multimillion-dollar company that sold athletic shoes? A paralyzed guy, two morbidly obese guys, a chain-smoking guy? It was bracing to realize that, in this group, the one with whom I had the most in common was . . . Johnson.”
521. “I think I’m not a natural-born salesman, for sure, but If I have a product I really believe in, I can overcome some of the shyness and get through the things that aren’t natural to me.” – Phil Knight
522. “Everybody was writing about computers and electronics, but all I really knew about was running. It’s what I’ve chosen to do with my life.” – Phil Knight
523. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.” — Phil Knight
524. “Every businessman, or every person who has a passion for his work, is torn for the time spent at work and the time spent with your family.” – Phil Knight
525. “Let everyone else call your idea crazy... just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where ‘there’ is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.”
526. “Since it was Thanksgiving, the in-flight meal was turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Since we were bound for Japan, there was also raw tuna, miso soup, and hot sake. I ate it all, while reading the paperbacks I’d stuffed into my backpack. The Catcher in the Rye and Naked Lunch. I identified with Holden Caulfield, the teenage introvert seeking his place in the world, but Burroughs went right over my head. The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. Too”
527. “Some inside Nike worried about Werschkul’s seriousness, fearing it bordered on obsession. Fine by me, I thought. Obsessives were the only ones for the job.”
528. “So that morning in 1962 I told myself: ‘Let everyone else call your idea crazy… just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where there is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.'”
529. “Before running a big race, you always want to walk the track.”
530. “There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.”
531. “You can’t explain much in 60 seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don’t have to. It’s that simple.”
532. “I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now. In”
533. “Too rich for my blood.”
534. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way -- that leaves us.” -- Phil Knight
535. “Eyes closed, I conjured the great Churchill. You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory . . . without victory, there is no survival. I wanted desperately to hop a bus to Stratford, to see Shakespeare’s house. (Elizabethan women wore”
536. “Perception can be changed.”
537. “A shoe dog is somebody that really loves shoes, and that was me. I was a runner… that became important to me, and it’s been with me ever since.”
538. “There's kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided.”
539. “(Romans in the age of the Caesars believed that putting on the right shoe before the left brought prosperity and good luck.)”
540. “I think of the countless Nike offices around the world. At each one, no matter the country, the phone number ends in 6453, which spells out Nike on the keypad. But, by pure chance, from right to left it also spells out Pre's best time in the mile, to the tenth of a second: 3:54.6”
541. “Li em meu guia que o portão torii é um portal para locais sagrados e deleitei-me com a santidade e a serenidade do lugar, tentando assimilar tudo aquilo.”
542. “Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company. Not that any of us thought we wouldn’t fail; in fact we had every expectation that we would. But when we did fail, we had faith that we’d do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it.”
543. “I told her that I flat-out didn’t want to work for someone else. I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.”
544. “Every runner understands this. Front runners always work the hardest, and risk the most. Long”
545. “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. It was the right tack for Patton and his GIs. But did that make it right for a bunch of Buttfaces? I worried.”
546. “But when we did fail, we had faith that we’d do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it.”
547. “the best way to reinforce your knowledge of a subject is to share it,”
548. “By then Prefontaine was universally known as Pre, and he was far more than a phenom; he was an outright superstar. He was the biggest thing to hit the world of American track and field since Jesse Owens. Sportswriters frequently compared him to James Dean, and Mick Jagger, and Runner’s World said the most apt comparison might be Muhammad Ali. He was that kind of swaggery, transformative figure.”
549. “I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, shorter as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all... different.”
550. “I read in my guidebook that Michelangelo was miserable while painting his masterpiece. His back and neck ached. Paint fell constantly into his hair and eyes. He couldn’t wait to be finished, he told friends. If even Michelangelo didn’t like his work, I thought, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
551. “One ounce sliced off a pair of shoes, he said, is equivalent to 55 pounds over one mile. He wasn’t kidding. His math was solid. You take the average man’s stride of six feet, spread it out over a mile (5,280 feet), you get 880 steps. Remove one ounce from each step—that’s 55 pounds on the button. Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated to less burden, which meant more energy, which meant more speed. And speed equaled winning. Bowerman didn’t like to lose. (I got it from him.) Thus lightness was his constant goal. Goal”
552. “Confidence. More than equity, more than liquidity, that’s what a man needs.”
553. “History is one long processional of crazy ideas.”
554. “Alonguei as pernas, a região lombar e gemi enquanto dava os primeiros passos obstinados pela rua fria, em meio à névoa. Por que é sempre tão difícil começar?”
555. “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. ”
556. “Am I allowed to think that some coincidences are more than coincidental? Can I be forgiven for thinking, or hoping, that the universe, or some guiding daemon, has been nudging me, whispering to me? Or else just playing with me? Can it really be nothing but a fluke of geography that the oldest shoes ever discovered are a pair of nine-thousand-year-old sandals . . . salvaged from a cave in Oregon?”
557. “He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to-equally important qualities in a friend. Essential in a travel companion.”
558. “The idea interested me, then inspired me, then captivated me”
559. “planteamiento. Era un pensador lineal y, según el zen, el pensamiento lineal no es más que una ilusión, una de las muchas que nos hacen infelices. Según el zen, la realidad no es lineal. No hay futuro, no hay pasado. Todo es ahora. Daba la sensación de que en todas las religiones el yo fuera un obstáculo, un enemigo. Y sin embargo el zen declara claramente que el yo no existe. El yo es un espejismo, un sueño febril, y nuestra obstinada creencia en”
560. “I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, shorter as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all… different.”
561. “We knew we could fail; we just didn’t think we would.” – Phil Knight
562. “Fight not to win, but to avoid losing. A surefire losing strategy.”
563. “I ate a terrible midday meal in a dark tavern, surrounded by soot-faced laborers. Each looked bone-tired. They chewed slowly, absently, like zombies. Why must we work so hard? I thought. Consider the lilies of the field . . . they neither toil nor spin.”
564. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen.” – Phil Knight
565. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. (from Lewis Carroll's masterpiece "Through the Looking-Glass", quoted by Phil Knight)
566. “All is vanity, says the Bible. All is now, says Zen. All is dust, says the desert.”
567. “If 1967 had been the Summer of Love, 1970 was the Summer of Liquidity, and I had none.”
568. “Confidence. More than equity, more than liquidity, that’s what a man needs. I wished I had more. I wished I could borrow some. But confidence was cash. You had to have some to get some. And people were loath to give it to you.”
569. “I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves.”
570. “Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.”
571. “In periods of stress and grief, not only does your mind do funny things, you say things that surprise you.”
572. “Japanese literature, philosophy, clothing, domestic life, all were marvelously pure and spare. Minimalist. Expect nothing, seek nothing, grasp nothing—the immortal Japanese poets wrote lines that seemed polished and polished until they gleamed like the blade of a samurai’s sword, or the stones of a mountain brook.”
573. “evoqué al gran Churchill: «¿Me pregunta que cuál es nuestro objetivo? Puedo responder con una palabra. La victoria, la victoria a toda costa, la victoria a pesar del terror, la victoria… Sin victoria no hay supervivencia». Deseaba”
574. “maybe the cure for any burnout is to work harder.”
575. “There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.” — Phil Knight
576. “Dare to take chances, lest you leave your talent buried in the ground.”
577. Play by the rules, but be ferocious.” – Phil Knight
578. “But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.”
579. “Marketing knits the whole organization together.” – Phil Knight
580. ... vital human emotion, maybe the most vital of all, after love. Gratitude.
581. “I was crazed with loneliness, cut off from everything and everyone I knew. The occasional sight of a New York Times, or a Time magazine, gave me a lump in my throat.”
582. “Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people's victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.”
583. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way – that leaves us.”
584. “If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents.”
585. “Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company. Not that any of us thought we wouldn’t fail; in fact we had every expectation that we would. But when we did fail, we had faith that we’d do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it. Johnson”
586. “Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao. And since no one has ever adequately defined Tao, I now try to go regularly to mass. I would tell them: Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart.”
587. “I’d always suspected, the essence of beauty or truth, or all we ever need to know of either, lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided.”
588. “I was following a path that felt like my path, and though I wasn’t sure where it would lead, I was ready to find out.”
589. “Play by the rules, but be ferocious.” – Phil Knight, founder, Nike
590. “The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.” — Phil Knight
591. “You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.”
592. “Um tigre caça melhor quando está faminto.”
593. “We were the kind of people who wanted our work to be play. But meaningful play. We were trying to slay Goliath, and though”
594. “We were the kind of people who wanted our work to be play. But meaningful play. We were trying to slay Goliath,”
595. “Running track gives you a fierce respect for numbers, because you are what your numbers say you are, nothing more, nothing less.”
596. “You can’t explain much in 60 seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don’t have to. It’s that simple.” Phil Knight
597. “We had no capital but we grew.” – Phil Knight
598. “We used to think that everything started in the lab. Now we realize that everything spins off the consumer.” – Phil Knight
599. “everything I could find about importing and exporting, about starting a company. Finally, as required, I’d given a formal presentation of the paper to my classmates, who reacted with formal boredom. Not one asked a single question. They greeted my passion and intensity”
600. “Existe um tipo de luminosidade viva nesse pulsante meio segundo que antecede a decisão sobre a vitória ou a derrota.”
601. “Fortune favors the brave, that sort of thing. I”
602. Take action and believe in yourself. Dreams do come true.
603. “He’s one of the best storytellers in the history of Nike. My favorite, naturally, is the one about the day we went public. He sat his parents down and told them the news. “What does that mean?” they whispered. “It means your original eight-thousand-dollar loan to Phil is worth $1.6 million.” They looked at each other, looked at Woodell. “I don’t understand,” his mother said. If you can’t trust the company your son works for, who can you trust?”
604. “somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.”
605. “Voltaire. «Ama la verdad, pero perdona el error.» Cogí”
606. “For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood.”
607. “No brilliant idea was ever born in a conference room,” he assured the Dane. “But a lot of silly ideas have died there,” said Stahr. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon.” — Phil Knight
608. “El último día me paseé por los Campos Elíseos, siguiendo el camino de los libertadores y pensando todo el rato en Patton. «No le digas a la gente cómo hacer las cosas; diles qué hacer y deja que te sorprendan con el resultado.»”
609. “I do believe that international trade agreements benefit both nations, always.” Phil Knight
610. “I don’t consider myself enigmatic, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my public persona.” Phil Knight
611. “Driving back to Portland I’d puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves.”
612. “On general accounting principles, a pair shipped was a pair sold, so the daily pair count determined my mood, my digestion, my blood pressure, because it largely determined the fate of Blue Ribbon”
613. “Whatever comes, just don’t stop. That’s”
614. “What if there were a way to play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing”
615. “We were mostly Oregon guys, which was important. We had an inborn need to prove ourselves, to show the world that we weren't hicks and hayseeds.”
616. “Whatever comes, just don’t stop.”
617. “Our final meeting was with the Ministry of Foreign Trade. As with all previous meetings, there were several rounds of long speeches, mainly by officials. Hayes was bored during the first round. By the third round he was suicidal. He started playing with the loose threads on the front of his polyester dress shirt. Suddenly he became annoyed with the threads. He took out his lighter. As the deputy minister of foreign trade was hailing us as worthy partners, he stopped and looked up to see that Hayes had set himself on fire.”
618. “But I also thought of all the games I’d seen through the years—football, basketball, baseball—when one team had a big lead in the final seconds, or innings, and relaxed. Or tightened. And therefore lost. I told myself to stop looking back, keep my gaze forward.”
619. “At first, we couldn’t be establishment, because we didn’t have any money. We were guerrilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit. But, as we became No. 1 in our industry, we’ve had to modify our culture and become a bit more planned.”
620. “I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.” — Phil Knight
621. “Any entrepreneur has to prepare for a lot of dark days, and they’ve got to really like what they are doing, and they have to have a reason for it to succeed.” Phil Knight
622. “God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. Short of that, I'd like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so some young man or woman, somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted. Or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete or painter or novelist, might press on.
623. “Every few seconds, CLING-clong, CLING-clong, a cobbler’s concerto.”
624. “The East Coast was running smoothly, but it now involved too much administration for him. The whole thing needed reorganizing, streamlining, and that wasn’t the best use of Johnson’s time or creativity”
625. “All is vanity, says the Bible. All is now, says Zen, All is dust, says the desert.” — Phil Knight
626. “Segundo o zen, a realidade não é linear. Não existe futuro nem passado. Só o agora.”
627. “The popular chant at Oregon State games was: "If you can't get your Dick Enright, get your Dick Harter!”
628. “Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation.”
629. “Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree. I.”
630. “A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing.” – Phil Knight
631. “When you really understand who you are, it enables you to fight and believe.” Phil Knight
632. “I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.” – Phil Knight
633. “He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to - equally important qualities in a friend. Essential in a travel companion.”
634. “I am a man who has always needed heroes.”
635. “Dare to take chances, lest you leave your talent buried in the ground.” – Phil Knight
636. “Again and again I learned that lack of equity was a leading cause of failure.”
637. “But everyone’s an athlete, he said. If you have a body, you’re an athlete.”
638. “The roadside was littered with cautious, conservative, prudent entrepreneurs. I wanted to keep my foot pressed hard on the gas pedal.”
639. “It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I’d tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.”
640. “Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.”
641. “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”
642. “Play by the rules, but be ferocious.” —Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike
643. “So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.”
644. “Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are really part of a very big advertising program, and the fact that they make so much money is because the markets have dictated that they get that money, and the fact that they endorse our products allows us to sell more products and create more jobs.”
645. “Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.”
646. “Though I’ve been known to call business war without bullets, it’s actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity.” — Phil Knight
647. “Když na to přijde, málokterý nápad je tak šílený jako má oblíbená činnost, běhání. Je to namáhavé. Bolí to. Je to nebezpečné. Odměna za to je jen malá a zdaleka ji nemáte zaručenou. Když běžíte po oválu nebo prázdnou ulicí, nemáte žádný reálný cíl.
648. “Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart.” – Phil Knight
649. “We knew we could fail; we just didn’t think we would.” Phil Knight
650. “All is vanity, says the Bible. All is now, says Zen, All is dust, says the desert.”
651. “There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought.” – Phil Knight
652. “But confidence was cash. You had to have some to get some. And people were loath to give it to you.”
653. “I felt that same sense of betrayal when Nike came under attack for conditions in our overseas factories—the so-called sweatshop controversy. Whenever reporters said a factory was unsatisfactory, they never said how much better it was than the day we first went in.”
654. “Play by the rules, but be ferocious.” — Phil Knight
655. “It is possible to tell a customer “no”, and have the customer thank you for doing it.”
656. “Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company. Not that any of us thought we wouldn’t fail; in fact we had every expectation that we would. But when we did fail, we had faith that we’d do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it.”
657. “For that matter, few ideas are as crazy as my favorite thing, running. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s risky. The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s”
658. “was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.”
659. “Enquanto auditava essas empresas, escavando as suas entranhas, separando-as e juntando-as de novo, eu também aprendia como elas sobreviveram, ou não. Como vendiam coisas, ou não. Como começaram a ter problemas – e como se livraram deles.”
660. “A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing.” — Phil Knight
661. “I think a businessman can be an artist just as much as a writer or a sculptor, so I’m real proud of what the company has become.” Phil Knight
662. “Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.”
663. “When I took the entrepreneurship class at Stanford, the first lecture was about an entrepreneur and his personality. They described it as being different than a businessman, who is an overall scientific manager.” Phil Knight
664. “We have to innovate for a specific reason, and that reason comes from the market. Otherwise, we’ll end up making museum pieces.”
665. “The world is without beauty when you lose, and I was about to lose, big-time. I”
666. Maybe the cure for any burnout... is to just work harder.
667. “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. Wrapped”
668. “The way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We happened to be great at it.”
669. “When I broached the subject with my father, when I worked up the nerve to speak to him about my Crazy Idea, I made sure it was in the early evening. That was always the best time with Dad. He was relaxed then, well fed, stretched out in his vinyl recliner in the TV nook. I can still tilt back my head and close my eyes and hear the sound of the audience laughing, the tinny theme songs of his favorite shows, Wagon Train and Rawhide.”
670. “Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart. In”
671. “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” -- Phil Knight
672. “Obviously, the bulk of my Nike shares have been set up in a trust.” Phil Knight
673. “It’s never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.”
674. “You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break. I.”
675. “Leaning back in my recliner each night, staring at the ceiling, I tried to settle myself. I told myself: Life is growth. You grow or you die.”
676. “You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break. ”
677. “Let everyone else call your idea crazy... just keep going. Don't stop. Don't even think about stopping until you get there, and don't give much thought to where "there" is. Whatever comes, just don't stop.”
678. “When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is – you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman.”
679. No matter the sport - no matter the human endeavor, really - total effort will win people's hearts.
680. “When you see only problems, you’re not seeing clearly.” – Phil Knight
681. “I do not follow conventional wisdom.”
682. “You’ve got to worry about what’s coming up to stay ahead of the curve…” – Phil Knight
683. “But that's the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.”
684. “A product, I thought, speaks for itself, or it doesn’t. In the end, it’s only quality that counts.”
685. “No matter the sport – no matter the human endeavor, really – total effort will win people’s hearts.”
686. “You cannot travel the path until you have become the path yourself.”
687. “Life is growth. You grow or you die.” — Phil Knight
688. “We want the brand to stand for the same thing all over the world.”
689. “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
690. “stopped at the corner of Marx-Engels-Platz. I looked around, all directions. Nothing. No trees, no stores, no life. I thought of all the poverty I’d seen in every corner of Asia. This was a different kind of poverty, more willful, somehow, more preventable.”
691. “His secret, I think, was that he just didn’t care what he said or how he said it or how it went over. He was totally honest, a radical tactic in any negotiation.”
692. “Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree. I.” — Phil Knight
693. “In the timeless, clarifying light of that moon, I begin to make a list.”
694. “The more I help others to succeed, the more I succeed.”
695. “I’m in the shoe business. Look at these things. They’re called Tigers. I faked out the company. I’m the US distributor. Come with me.” – Phil Knight
696. “If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents. My”
697. “Assets equal liabilities plus equity.”
698. “Those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up are charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop.”
699. “Sports is like rock ‘n’ roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions.”
700. “Love truth, but pardon error.”
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